Magic gas discovery

It has been discovered that Australian coal has a magical property – it is one of a small group of coals which produce an invisible gas with supernatural properties.

This magic gas, carbon dioxide, first became famous for its claimed ability to warm the whole world, thus removing the threat of a new ice age. The British academic who reported this magic power claimed that winter snow would become “a very rare and exciting event.”

Then an Australian guru predicted that just a tiny addition of magic gas to the atmosphere would abolish floods, and billions of dollars were spent constructing water desalination plants to combat his forecast of never-ending droughts.

Then after massive snows in Britain and huge floods in Australia, it was widely reported that magic gas could produce both heatwaves and snowstorms, floods and droughts and even bush fires, cyclones and tornadoes, depending on the way the political winds were blowing in that country.

Strangely, only a few countries are able to produce “magic” gas. A special exclusive club called the Kyoto Club was formed for these lucky countries. Membership fees are stratospheric, but members are rewarded with invitations to lavish UN conventions at top tourist destinations. However, many founding members have allowed their membership to lapse, leaving only the European Union, Australia and New Zealand as fully paid up members.

Coals burnt in Russia, India, China, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, Canada and USA produce carbon dioxide but their gas apparently lacks the magic climate-altering properties of Australian magic gas. Amazingly, these properties are lost if Australian coal is burnt overseas – once loaded on a ship the magic disappears.

There are a few unpatriotic Australians who think the whole magic gas thing is a big con and just an excuse for a new tax. Worried that the world may become sceptical of the magic gas story, CSIRO has been charged with re-educating these dangerous and deluded sceptics. Vast sums are also being spent by academics to invent more climate-bending properties for carbon dioxide, and regular dramatic announcements are expected on the ABC and the BBC.

Relevant Reading

In March 2000, Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, reported that within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”. He also said: “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

In 2007, Tim Flannery predicted cities such as Brisbane would never again have dam-filling rains, as global warming had caused “a 20 per cent decrease in rainfall in some areas” and made the soil too hot, “so even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and river systems … “.

“JC’s ‘forecast’ for the next 5 years: It looks like the AMO may have peaked, and we remain in the cool phase of the PDO with a predominance of La Nina events expected (unlikely to see a return to do El Nino dominance in the next decade). I predict we will see continuation of the ‘standstill’ in global average temperature for the next decade, with solar playing a role in this as well.”

“And it’s not just about thermometers or satellite instruments,” she said. “It’s about looking in our own backyards, when the trees are flowering now compared to 30 years ago, what types of birds and butterflies and bugs that … used to be further south.”

Whlist reading the Wiki page on Climate Sensitivity, I found this great line

Consensus estimates

A committee on anthropogenic global warming convened in 1979 by the National Academy of Sciences and chaired by Jule Charney[9] estimated climate sensitivity to be 3 °C, plus or minus 1.5 °C. Only two sets of models were available; one, due to Syukuro Manabe, exhibited a climate sensitivity of 2 °C, the other, due to James E. Hansen, exhibited a climate sensitivity of 4 °C. “According to Manabe, Charney chose 0.5 °C as a not-unreasonable margin of error, subtracted it from Manabe’s number, and added it to Hansen’s. Thus was born the 1.5 °C-to-4.5 °C range of likely climate sensitivity that has appeared in every greenhouse assessment since

Politicians, when facing challenges, will accept anything that will help their cause: the CO2 idea appeared just as the magic of the incantations of the various American business schools, merchant bankers and other allied hucksters were beginning to lose their honest shine and the financial abyss was beginning to appear at the politicians’ feet.
How very handy! How useful to have an alternative source of taxes which could make the shortfall caused by the business schools’ chicanery go away! But sadly, the posited rising rate of GW didn’t happen for 16 years and it became obvious to all except the most demented Chicken Littles that the sky is not falling in after all!
It should be clear to rational people by now that the earth’s climate does what it will while most politicians do what they do – attempt to fool enough people to keep themselves in office before their use-by date comes up.

[Response: Well, as I explained here, they would have gotten a better answer had those chosen any other parameter for a particular part of their routine than they did. I pointed this out in my review, but those chose to ignore it. I make no comment as to why.

I also noted that O’Donnell et al. treated the occupied Byrd station and Byrd AWS stations as two independent data sets, and because their calculations (like ours) remove the mean of each record, O’Donnell et al. removed information that might be rather important: namely, that the average temperatures in the AWS record (post 1980) are warmer — by about 1°C — than the pre-1980 manned weather station record. This observation, of course, is the precisely the basis of Bromwich et al.’s work. I considered this myself, but didn’t trust the instrument calibration at the time. I was right, as it turns out (as Bromwich et al. discovered, and for which they corrected). –eric]

A very nice comparison of recent work, but I note that, just as the global temps have been in a stillstand for nearly a decade, so it is with the West Antarctica–no significant rise since 2,000 or so.
Comments?

[Response: not really. I think we have discussed many times why short term linear trends are not predictive of anything very much – and that goes double for single points. – gavin]

“… with the color coding according to the phase of ENSO, the eye is able to compare apples to apples: the upward long-term trend during El Niño years (red triangles) is plain, the upward long-term trend during neutral years (green squares) is plain, and the upward long-term trend during La Niña years (blue diamonds) is plain.

Stare hard enough, though, and you see that they have leveled off. The last ten data points have little or no trend. But we see that the lack of trend is at least partly due to the El Niño year near the beginning of the 10-year period and the two La Niña years near the end.

Let’s get quantitative about this. In this case, with the temperature rise being nearly linear, it helps to add trendlines….”

[Response: It is warming nearly everywhere but at a statistically insignificant rate. South Pole can no longer be said to be cooling — the trend over the entire record (1957-2011) is flat. You can get the data here if you are interested.–eric]

+ + +

Last comment to date,

39 crandles says:
16 Jan 2013 at 3:27 PM

I see the GISS temperature record has been changed upwards for several years. Does this mean Byrd station data is already included?

[Response: That seems unlikely! I will try to find out about this though.–eric]

Steig “It [East Antarctica] is warming nearly everywhere but at a statistically insignificant rate. South Pole can no longer be said to be cooling — the trend over the entire record (1957-2011) is flat.”

Don’t know where the statistically insignificant warming is in the Southern Polar satellite series though,

Interesting to go through comments at the John Nielsen-Gammon Climate Abyss post linked above at RC (Tisdale and Pielke Snr turn up among others, ping backs from HT). The post (leaves out the 2009/10 El Nino) is the same basis that Hansen, Sato and Ruedy state for concluding global warming is continuing.

A proliferation of “Tyndall gas driven warming” terminology (first time I’ve seen that). I assume to be the same as magic gas warming.

According to the first link above [ http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/SixtyYearCycle.htm ] with all of its supporting data on existence of a 62 year cycle that also includes ENSO effects, we should expect a cooling effect from this cycle over the next 22 years of about 0.35 deg C from 2002 levels. Hopefully we can better understand causes of this longer term climate cycle over the next 22 years and use the results to make better predictions of net CO2 warming trends for the future.

It was by no means neutral, coming in at the bottom of those 7 strongest.

Nielsen-Gammon’s neutral trajectory puts end of 2012 up around 0.65 C anomaly on GISTEMP but by the end of 2012 ENSO was neutral and the anomaly was at 0.45 and heading down putting it below Nielsen-Gammon’s La Nina trajectory before a La Nina has even formed (whenever that is):-

THE world’s great forests have long been recognised as the lungs of the earth, but the science establishment has been rocked by claims that trees may also be the heart of its climate.

Not only do trees fix carbon and produce oxygen; a new and controversial paper says they collectively unleash forces powerful enough to drive global wind patterns and are a core feature in the circulation of the climate system.

If the theory proves correct, the peer-reviewed international paper co-authored by Australian scientist Douglas Sheil will overturn two centuries of conventional wisdom about what makes wind. And it will undermine key principles of every model on which climate predictions are based.

The paper, Where do winds come from? A new theory on how water vapour condensation influences atmospheric pressure and dynamics, is not designed to challenge the orthodox view on climate science. But Sheil, a professor of forest ecology and conservation at Southern Cross University’s School of Environment, Science and Engineering, says he is not surprised that is how the paper has been received internationally.

“So my interpretation of these data is: those two 60-year periods seen in the data may look like an oscillation, but they aren’t. Which has some consequences for prediction: an oscillation would suggest a coming downturn; if the system simply follows the forcing we’d expect the opposite. In 30 years time we will know for sure!”

That brief moment of near-clarity is wrt the atmosphere. The 60-yr period peaked around 2002 and the fast response has been evident in the atmosphere and SST since then (cooling) but Stefan’s post is about SLR and his reasoning’s a bit whacky on that e.g. “the apparent sea-level “cycle” is also not an oscillation” (as he puts it) because:-

“There is a simpler explanation: it looks like global temperature basically follows the forcing and global sea level follows the temperature, just as you would physically expect.”

Certainly NOT what I’d “physically expect” Stefan. Question is: what physical process does he base his reasoning on? The answer lies in his previous post (Part 1):-

“My bottom line: [………] This increase in the rate of sea-level rise is a logical consequence of global warming, since ice melts faster and heat penetrates faster into the oceans in a warmer climate.”

There’s so much wrong with that process and basis it’s hard to believe the statement can be ascribed to a prominent climate scientist commenting on a supposedly major societal and infrastructural threat.

Even more disturbing, a brief scan through the 76 comments to date and no-one takes issue.

David Appell has covered an interesting story with dueling scientists writing climate-related letters published in The Oregonian newspaper. It began with the newspaper publishing an opinion-editorial written by Gordon Fulks, who lives in Corbett, Oregon and has a background in physics. The editorial was full of conspiracy theories, inflammatory language, and several long-debunked climate myths. Among them was the myth that global warming stopped 15 years ago.

Oregon State climate scientist Andreas Schmittner responded with a letter to the editor, which focused primarily on debunking that particular myth.

“Fulks claims that global temperatures have not risen during the past 15 years. This is not true. Most heat trapped by carbon dioxide and other gases added to the atmosphere is absorbed by the oceans, as clearly seen in measurements available at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website … Fulks flunks climate science. He cherry-picks information that supports his conclusion and ignores the rest. That’s not science.”

Schmittner is of course entirely correct on this issue, and it’s critical to examine ocean heat content (OHC), because that’s where over 90% of global warming goes…………

“Scientists know that only logic and evidence apply. The evidence causing great grief is the refusal of the global temperature to increase for the past 15 years. It sloshes back and forth as one would expect on a planet with vast oceans and atmosphere that are never in equilibrium, but does not warm as some claimed it would with slowly increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Consequently, cracks are developing in the scientific facade supporting the dogma.

Reading the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is much like reading Pravda during the Cold War: You do not look for beliefs, but for hints of change. In a recent paper (not peer-reviewed), newly elected members touted their belief that they had found the “fingerprint” of greenhouse gases. Yet they admitted to a considerable discrepancy with observations, a fatal flaw in a rational world. And buried deeply in the last table of supplementary information was the evidence that their climate simulations are failing badly.

Perhaps this is what prompted the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to insert a sentence in its most recent draft report saying that the sun is more important than it previously realized. With NOAA now admitting that the present solar cycle will finish far below most in the Grand Maximum of solar cycles over the past two centuries, with American solar physicists William Livingston and Matthew Penn pointing to a collapsing solar magnetic field, and with Russian astrophysicist Habibullo Abdussamatov saying that carbon dioxide is “not guilty” and predicting a prolonged cooling this century, it is about time.

The previous warm periods (Medieval, Roman and Minoan) likely had the same natural origin as the present one. Hence, we should expect a century of cooling that essentially reverses the warming of the 20th century. This is what the Greenland ice core temperature reconstructions show happened previously.”

# # #

To be expected that the-warming-continues sector would consider such an article an affront to be vigourously attacked – by use of a tobacco analogy.

Abstract
We examine long tide gauge records in every ocean basin to examine whether a quasi 60-year oscillation observed in global mean sea level (GMSL) reconstructions reflects a true global oscillation, or an artifact associated with a small number of gauges. We find that there is a significant oscillation with a period around 60-years in the majority of the tide gauges examined during the 20th Century, and that it appears in every ocean basin. Averaging of tide gauges over regions shows that the phase and amplitude of the fluctuations are similar in the North Atlantic, western North Pacific, and Indian Oceans, while the signal is shifted by 10 years in the western South Pacific. The only sampled region with no apparent 60-year fluctuation is the Central/Eastern North Pacific. The phase of the 60-year oscillation found in the tide gauge records is such that sea level in the North Atlantic, western North Pacific, Indian Ocean, and western South Pacific has been increasing since 1985-1990. Although the tide gauge data are still too limited, both in time and space, to determine conclusively that there is a 60-year oscillation in GMSL, the possibility should be considered when attempting to interpret the acceleration in the rate of global and regional mean sea level rise.

Going by my current experience (the first at SkS BTW) there was engagement by all-comers but mostly in the form of faith-based preaching.

Tom Curtis provided me with a screed of unnecessary education elucidating the doctrine at 65 (no citations whatsoever) but when he tried his hand at drawing inference from quotes the results were laughable e.g my analysis of his inference in 65 at 68.

You, [Tom]

“Rahmstorf – heat [from the sun] penetrates faster into [sun => ocean heat transfer process] the oceans in a warmer climate [because it does not escapes so easilly].”

Are you seriously implying by this inference that radiative penetration of sea water is faster at 15 C ambient atm temperature say than 14 C ? The speed of EM radiation being the speed of light in both cases.

Or parephrasing – radiation from the sun penetrates faster into the oceans in a warmer climate because it does not escape so easily? That does not make sense.

The thing is, their big challenges come from lone-wolf sceptics (think Péter Berényi’s stellar perfomance) venturing into the echo chamber so responses are either weight-of-numbers hand waving and put downs with a smattering of actual issue dissection or to keep tricky issues safely under the carpet. There does seem to be an unwritten code that when a specific point is raised that will open a can of worms if responded to it is let go by. Also a Real Climate tactic I note

And yes again re Shub, they certainly don’t want to draw attention to tricky sceptic arguments, better to keep those subordinate and assert superiority (they think). As Shub puts it:-

“Consider what Cook does on his website. He takes a purported ‘myth’ which is usually a caricatural simplification of an original question and start off confidently pretending that there is a clear-cut refutation. The refutation is constituted by an answer that is often over-simplified to the point of falseness. When all messy questions that arise from reality are ‘myths’, all answers are simple.”

The IPCC likes synthesis of simplification too – easier to fool the policy wonks with and no literature to communicate at that stage. Their CO2 RF forcing curve is a (log) simplification of a (log – log) simplification from which is derived a synthesis of conclusions for those oblivious to the background and unwilling and unable to comprehend it anyway.

” The British Geological Survey is understood to have increased dramatically its official estimate of the amount of shale gas to between 1,300 trillion and 1,700 trillion cubic feet, dwarfing its previous estimate of 5.3 trillion cubic feet.”

So let me get this right. 390 cows did nothing to raise the humidity in a closed environment, but their methane emissions trapped the heat? Wow – this has got to qualify for the Stupid Journalist Stupider Award. Hey, but on the bright side, at least the methane didn’t get outside the plane where it could have had catastrophic effects on our planet’s ability to survive. Whew!

Households asked to put a wash on when it’s windy
In the old days we would put a wash on when it is windy outside so clothes dry, but in the future we could be washing when it is windy because electricity bills are lower

Anonymous billionaires donated $120m to more than 100 anti-climate groups working to discredit climate change science

Conservative billionaires used a secretive funding route to channel nearly $120m (£77m) to more than 100 groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change, the Guardian has learned.

The funds, doled out between 2002 and 2010, helped build a vast network of thinktanks and activist groups working to a single purpose: to redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a highly polarising “wedge issue” for hardcore conservatives.

The millions were routed through two trusts, Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund, operating out of a generic town house in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington DC. Donors Capital caters to those making donations of $1m or more.

“There is wide scientific consensus that the increased number and intensity of climate change induced natural disasters, such as earthquakes, volcano eruptions, tsunamis and hurricanes, is of alarming concern,” said Ruppel, though adding that not all climate events lead to disasters.

Professor Oliver C Ruppel is professor of Law at Stellenbosch University, specialising in Public International Law and Diplomacy, World Trade Law, Regional Integration Policy, Sustainable Development Law and International Environmental Law. He serves as AR5 co-ordinating lead author for the Chapter on Africa of the UN IPCC, Working Group II.

Regarding the public figure reference, I think it is fairly easy to meet that hurdle in my case, especially when you consider my professional life. I can go through the public history of my blog but work makes me even more public. That is one of the reasons the journal made quick corrective action in my case. I also encouraged resolution by using the approach of make a change and we will put this behind us rather than I’m going to sue. I haven’t re-read the correspondence but did express the problem in a fairly aggressive manner to make sure they would comply.

NIck,

There is one issue which you are missing in Lewandowsky’s reference. It wasn’t just temperature, he also called me a denier despite a large body of public work to the contrary. You have wondered openly if one can suffer damages from being called a denier or claiming illegitimate adjustment of temp records and I understand that. I think you misunderstand the risks a climate blogger takes in disagreeing publicly with a hundred billion dollar global pro-government industry. I used to misunderstand it myself.

How is it that a professor in another country can openly call for the deaths and prosecution of a list of “deniers” as defined by the desmog blog, without fear of retribution? How deep does that sentiment go in the population when the leadership of that particular political movement can write about government sanctioned execution so publicly? How come that professor isn’t fired before we even hear about it?

How can a different professor gather together groups of other professors and in a scientific journal, falsely characterize members of the public (by name!) as holding beliefs they don’t, in not just one, but two separate publications. Remember, I’ve personally been attacked twice by Lewandosky, not once, and not at an unfunded blog he personally runs, but rather in government funded research on another continent. Now he didn’t act alone either time, but rather got other people to sign their professional names on the list for the attacks.

Think about that for a moment. This is what these people do for a living. This is their professional reputation, what they define themselves with, how they gain employment, get paid etc. If any of them have aspirations of having long term scientific employment, why isn’t accuracy paramount to emotion in their science? The answer is simple.

Lewandowsky could have claimed he misunderstood the first time he misrepresented me and moved on. Even if we assume your point with repsect to my statement on the temperature record was a reasonable interpretation. But the SECOND time he attacked me, he said almost the same thing even though it had been explained to him very clearly by email. He committed by any definition, libel, with malicious intent. He also committed scientific fraud by any definition I know of because he knew the second time, from my personal emails, that his reference of me was 100% inaccurate.

[self snip before Lucia puts me on real moderation]

I think that the reason my name was used with such inaccuracy on two separate occasions, was not my climate stance, many people here hold the same climate opinions that I do. I think it is likely from Lew’s attacks on capitalism in these same papers, that my political stance- white male capitalist libertarian businessman, is what drew him to put the crosshairs on me. After all, finding that particular link on my blog means he is one of my esteemed readers so he couldn’t possibly have missed my politics! That is a bit of a guess though.

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Hot spot doesn’t exist

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GHG fingerprint missing

About 2000, climate scientists predicted and the IPCC agreed that, if the global temperature was strongly influenced by carbon dioxide (or GHG generally), there would be a unique "fingerprint" of that influence high over the tropics — a tropospheric "hot spot". So they started looking for it. Pretty soon after that, some of them made up wild claims that they'd found it, but at the same time others were inventing fanciful reasons for why it wasn't there. It's still missing.